XII
General Petros Zalil, known to the public as head of Party Intelligence, but to Abdul Rahman as Director General of Jihaz Haneen, was a vile Christian bug. A failed doctor and scholar, Zalil had amused his way through youth by decoding ancient dead languages and practising ‘surgical interventions’ on a variety of household pets. His family of shopkeepers, who had left Lebanon to settle in Tikrit during the Ottoman times, despaired of young Petros ever bringing honour or profit to the name Zalil, but then shopkeepers never care for politics. And no one was surprised more than his father when, after the first failed Ba’ath revolution in 1963, young Petros was charged with the task of constructing the Ba’ath Party’s secret apparatus.
Though a Christian (he liked to remind people that a cousin had once served the Patriarch of the Maronite Church as personal secretary), Petros Zalil cared nothing for God and less for man. A feverish, personal sense of injustice had fired him into the steel rod so needed by the Ba’ath Party. Zalil hated everyone and everything lukewarm, especially those weak in their commitment to the Ba’ath. He resented and eliminated communists wherever he smelled their foul stench. Timeservers in every Ministry, he smoked out like hares from their holes. Officers who had joined the ranks during the time of President Aref were cashiered, then jailed. And it was Zalil who almost single-handedly cleansed Iraq of the Jews. His bitter hateful feelings were distributed universally and democratically; there was no one Zalil did not loathe, except Saddam Hussein, the man who had personally chosen him to build the party’s secret police: the Instrument of Yearning. Jihaz Haneen. And it was because of Zalil and his secret organs that the first Ba’ath President, al Bakr, and Vice President Saddam Hussein, were able to keep the power they grabbed in July 1968.
Of course, Zalil had no military or security training — where was a poor shopkeeper’s son to find such means? — but Saddam knew that Zalil understood the most fundamental law of Ba’ath survival: loyalty. Saddam was confident that Zalil, Christian though he was, could, and would, bring order to the secret groups, which by 1963 had been completely infiltrated by the army’s generals. Perhaps because he was snatched from obscurity (Zalil was a mere sergeant in the Tikrit police when Saddam discovered him) Petros Zalil did not disappoint his master. From that day forth his mind remained vigilant to anything and anyone who threatened his Almighty, his God, his Creator, his Comrade, Brother, Father Saddam. In fact, Zalil’s personal devotion to his Saviour became the only standard by which Jihaz Haneen was to be judged. Truly, Petros Zalil was a giant of the Iraqi nation.
In the early days, General Petros Zalil — he had been promoted in 1965 — could not trust his good fortune; lest he lose the grace of his benefactor, Petros Zalil took upon himself the task of demonstrating his loyalty to Saddam at every opportunity. Even the triumph of the 1968 July Revolution did not allow him to relax. But then in December 1968 a very nasty conspiracy designed to bring down the young Ba’athist State was publicly exposed by Zalil and at last, once and for all, his place close to Saddam’s breast was secured.
The entire nation, including Abdul Rahman, had watched the disgusting interview on television or listened on the radio. Three men (one of them a Party big shot) confessed that they had been recruited by a merchant of kitchen utensils in Basra: a Jew named Nadji Zilkha. The Jew used a radio set he had manufactured and hidden inside a church to contact Israel. He had arranged for Iraqi Jews to receive military training in camps in the mountains of Iran and, with the help of the Kurds in the north, succeeded in setting up a channel through which large amounts of dollars from Israel to Iraqi Jews flowed. Such a terrible plan could only have been imagined by a Jew! Of course, Zilkha, the Persians and the Kurds were not alone. The President of Lebanon, Henry Firoun, arranged for the Director of the American Ford car company in Baghdad, also a Jew, to smuggle the Iraqi Jews into Iran by means of a Pakistani shipping company! When the men completed their pitiful confession, the judge sent them directly to prison. They never were seen by their families after that day. But the others, mostly Jews, thirteen in all, were rounded up by Zalil’s men and executed within three weeks.
On the day of the executions, Abdul Rahman and his friend Aziz went with the crowds to watch the Jew corpses swinging in Nafura Square. What a marvellous sight! Iraqis came from all across the country. Even Bedous, stinking of date oil, emerged out of the desert on their camels and pressed into the square, jumping up and down to get a glimpse of the criminals. President al Bakr shouted encouragement to the crowd, vowing to foil all the plans of the Zionists.
Like the other spectators, Abdul Rahman had no particular feelings about Jews. They had shops which everyone knew about, but they spoke like Arabs and looked like them too. As the corpses dangled in the square, the crowd was excited not by feelings against the Jews but by feelings of pride. Of victory over traitors. Until the Ba’ath, Iraqis had resigned themselves to foreign domination: Persians, Turks, the English. Everyone wanted to remove Iraqi oil at low prices. It was only when Petros Zalil took control of the secret organisations that Iraqis dared feel confident. To see the limp bodies of those traitors was a great day in Iraqi life. The people were sure that from now on all foreigners would think very carefully before attempting to undermine the State; especially, but not only, the treacherous Jews.
The response of the public and the President encouraged Zalil; more and more conspiracies were exposed. Every week the papers published the names of those who had been caught in their plottings and executed. Hundreds of Iraqis swung from lampposts in those days; and not just Jews. Christians too, and even Muslims. Zalil’s power grew with each triumph. With every exposed plan, the head of Party Intelligence’s confidence swelled. Newspapers and officials praised his efforts. His speeches, full of long, impressive words, were printed and sold as pamphlets. On the second anniversary of the Revolution Zalil gave a speech in Tahrir Square which Abdul Rahman never forgot.
‘The Iraq of today,’ Zalil shouted, ‘the great Ba’athist and Arab homeland, the womb of culture, will henceforth not tolerate traitors, spies, foreign agents or fifth columnists. Not a single one. The bastard-child Israel, Imperialist America and Persian lackeys must hear this message. We will discover their dirty tricks! We will take punitive action against their agents! We will suspend their spies from Iraqi trees, even if they despatch thousands of them! You, each of you, are the protectors of the great Iraqi nation. You must not slacken the pace we have set since the advent of our pan-Arab revolution! We have just taken the initial steps of the revolution! The great immortal squares of Iraq shall be filled up with corpses of traitors and doublecrossers! Just wait!’
The Christian general praised the success and efficiency of his secret police. But, he noted with regret, some, especially those not ‘entirely Arab and purely Iraqi’, seemed to be questioning whether it was indeed necessary any more, at this stage of the Revolution, to fill up the squares and alleys of Iraq with traitorous corpses. Some newspapers, he screamed, had begun to sow seeds of doubt within the public. The crowds attending the executions were decreasing in size. The papers were writing shorter and shorter articles on the public humiliations and executions. One rag especially, Al Anwar, was leading the way. Wasn’t the paper’s proprietor a pre-Revolutionary minister in Qasim’s thug government? A new plan was needed, Zalil bellowed, which would meet this new challenge to the victory of the Revolution.
‘Any strategem to achieve victory over the enemy,’ he continued, ‘must consider from the outset liquidating those pockets which guarantee that the enemy has information, and that play a role in generating destabilising propaganda, thereby weakening the spirits of the people and their resolve for victory. This leads to a loss of self-confidence in preparation for defeat. When we Arab Iraqis become determined to wage war against the foreign un-Arab espionage networks, we of necessity must be aware, and we must be possessed of the certitude that hitting at these networks must necessarily be accompanied by an assault on the pockets of mongrel Judeo-Persian-American exploitation. In order to purify the nation and its people, I propose to refocus our efforts on these sinister pockets of public treason.’
Three days after the speech, the owner and editor of Al Anwar daily newspaper died when his car exploded into the evening sky of Baghdad. The next day a bus carrying Jewish schoolchildren to their college was bombed as well. Throughout Baghdad, and even in other cities like Mosul and Kirkuk, prominent but suspicious journalists, professors and priests were murdered in a terrible campaign of car bombs. The explosions were so frequent that Baghdadis avoided all vehicles, preferring to walk about the city. The taxi drivers petitioned the government to take action to save their livelihoods.
Zalil’s campaign succeeded beyond his own wild imagination. Not only were dozens of State enemies eliminated but within months President al Bakr announced Zalil’s elevation to the Revolutionary Command Council. Al Bakr, they said, nearly showed tears during his speech. Iraqis had always been known for their loud mouths and boisterous ways but from the time of the rise of Petros Zalil, Iraq was transformed into a country more quiet than midnight. ‘My proudest achievement,’ Petros Zalil never tired of repeating.
Indeed, turning a nation of hotheads into a laboratory of mice within five years was a grand accomplishment. And for more then ten years Zalil was satisfied. But it was only a matter of time before the situation began to change. For ten years Zalil feared Saddam. But slowly he developed his plan to devour him.
‘Is it not often the case that the gateman is more powerful than the king?’ Zalil enjoyed speaking to his own image each morning as he shaved. As the most feared man in Iraq he had few friends but even as a boy he had preferred his own company. Other humans were an annoyance. The razor cut a path through the thick white cream, and he said out loud. ‘The king, busy within the castle, manages the affairs of his people, but he must trust the gateman to keep the enemy beyond the city walls. But should the gateman not be worthy of the king’s trust, or decide that the throne is rightfully his, since it is he who determines whether an usurper gains access to the inner court, then the king is transformed into a pawn. Who has more power? Surely, not the one who must trust in the other?’ As he splashed water onto his freshly shaved face he was satisfied that no one stood between him and President Saddam.
The gateman began to plan his own coronation.
*
In 1980 Zalil had applauded Saddam’s audacious invasion of Iran, but for years he had not been happy with the way the President was conducting the war. When Khomeini sent waves of children to face Iraqi tanks, the television and newspapers were filled with photos of fields, covered with little dead boys. Eight or nine years old. Who could comprehend the beastly nature of the Persians? Who could sacrifice their own sons in such a way?
Zalil of course cared nothing about the children. ‘Iraq,’ he shouted into the mirror one morning, ‘has been brought to its knees by toddlers.’ The refusal of Iraq’s top officers to slaughter the children was a point of humiliation, a sign of weakness that Zalil could not admit. ‘What better chance will God give to Iraq than this?’ he demanded. He ran water over the razor to relieve it of his heavy whiskers. ‘Never again will the road to Tehran be covered with such a plush carpet. Our tanks should roll over these Persian children as if they were a field of onions.’
It was not just the army’s reluctance to kill children; there was Saddam’s frequent change of field commanders which tried Zalil’s patience beyond all limits. For more than ten years Zalil had developed Haneen networks in every barracks and every regiment and battalion in the army and airforce. Many of the top brass were either fully Haneen or had sympathies with the head of Party Intelligence. Of course, these men were loyal Ba’athists; their allegiance to the Ba’ath Revolution was unquestionable. But they had been groomed by Zalil. It was he who had rigged their promotions and plotted their careers with the mind of a chess player; their ultimate loyalty was to him, not the President. ‘See again, how the gateman is more powerful than the king.’ He winked at himself in the mirror.
One year the Iraqi army lost over twenty top field commanders. And middle rank officers? Beyond counting. Every time a battle was lost and even once when the broken axle of a supply truck caused a delay in the refuelling of an advance unit the commander in charge was summoned back to HQ. Bang. Dead. Soon the High Command didn’t bother to make the arrangements to bring the officers back to Baghdad; they were shot in their own units, usually by their own soldiers.
‘This is intolerable. How can the President demand vigilance if he is intent on plucking out every eye I have put into place?’ He made another large sweep through the remaining foam of his pudgy face. ‘Damn!’ A small trickle of maroon blood moved down his right cheek. Zalil grabbed a towel with exasperation. ‘This man’s erratic behaviour threatens my entire life work. I cannot permit this to happen.’
*
The message was dispatched in a sealed envelope from the Ministry of Antiquities to each of their homes by the official ministry courier. In the envelope was an invitation to a celebration organised on the occasion of President Saddam’s birthday on April 28. Each of the recipients — thousands of officials around the country — was invited to make a donation of no less than one hundred dinars, and to select an ancient Sumerian symbol provided in a list by the Ministry of Antiquities. The donation would be used to mint a coin embossed with the name of each official and the special ancient Sumerian hieroglyph and was to be presented to the President on his birthday as a sign of the gratitude of his ministers.
The thousands of envelopes contained identical letters, worded exactly the same, and included the same set of Sumerian hieroglyphs. But in the envelopes delivered to the Ministers of Oil and Transport and Industry, Generals Fikri and Mahmood, and Dr Idris, Chairman of the Regional Command Council of Baghdad, Petros Zalil included his own short list of Sumerian symbols. Each man, a conspirator with the head of Party Intelligence, had been instructed to select one symbol only from Zalil’s list and return it with their invitation, and in this way indicate their participation in the gateman’s move against the king. Within a week Zalil had received five of the six special invitations properly marked. The Minister of Transport had lost his nerve and decided not to return his invitation. Without a second thought the viperous Zalil struck: two days later the Minister was discovered by the departmental cleaner, dead on his office floor, a bottle of turpentine next to his head. Five litres of fluid were pumped from his stomach when his bloated body was delivered to the Emergency Ward at Medinatul Tib hospital.
Each of the plotters had been in contact with their spider, Zalil, for some time, and each had his own private complaint. The Minister of Oil had been brought to financial ruin by the blackmail of Saddam’s half-brother, Barazan. Dr Idris’s son had been denied treatment for his cancer in Germany and died at the age of seventeen. The Generals, of course, feared for their lives as long as the Persian war raged on year after year. The Minister of Industry, Haider al Haji Younus, Abdul Rahman’s relative, had been three times denied a seat on the Regional Command Council of Tamim Region.
After the untimely, but little mourned, death of the Minister of Transport, Zalil arranged a large dinner party at his residence to mark a grand Revolutionary occasion. Among his guests were not just his colleagues in the conspiracy, but members of the President’s family, members of the RCC and the Prime Minister, Mr Izzat Qureishi. Zalil had prepared, and delivered very dramatically, a grand speech to mark the occasion and, of course, crates of whiskey, arrack and vodka and the most sumptuous meal had been laid on for the guests. But by the early hours of the morning Zalil was left alone with just his five co-conspirators. In a private study, in which every listening microphone and every hidden eye had been disabled prior to the start of the evening’s festivities, Zalil called the final meeting of the plotters to order. Each of the men present had been given their assignments: the Generals confirmed the availability of two thousand men and many armoured personnel carriers; the Oil Minister had already begun to scale down production, and the pipeline to Turkey was ‘closed for repairs’. Haider, Minister of Industry, had been in contact with Iraqi exiles in Europe for the past two years. Some had already returned; others were on the way. The only thing remaining was to finalise the actual plan. Zalil confirmed that Saddam would be out of the country for two weeks in June, on official visits to the Soviet Union, East Germany and Finland. Upon his return to the country, the group would assassinate the President.
Assassinating Saddam was a game of Russian roulette. The President of Iraq never travelled in his official, announced motorcade. Always, five dummy convoys were sent through the streets of Baghdad, each taking different routes to the destination, and even Saddam himself knew which motorcade he would choose only at the very moment he stepped into a vehicle.
But it was Zalil’s belief that as gateman he could successfully foil the system. The system, after all, had been designed by him. Within Haneen a unit answering to Colonel Nizar, was responsible for monitoring each and every alley and street in the city. Every lamppost, every window, every turn and every manhole was known to them. Colonel Nizar’s information was priceless, and he was with the plotters. Determining the routes of each convoy would not be difficult: Nizar’s unit was responsible for selecting and preparing and securing all routes on every Presidential journey. Only the driver of the lead vehicle, a Haneen employee, knew the route of the convoy, and that only a few moments before the beginning of the journey when he received the instructions, in code, on a secure radio channel.
Zalil and Nizar had arranged that along each route, near a predetermined crossroad, the first vehicle of each convoy, pre-planted with a bomb, would explode. Discovering which vehicle would lead each convoy was also simple. Always a dark-green, almost black, Mercedes provided by Party Intelligence and driven by Haneen drivers. This system had been instituted by Zalil in 1970 and it had never changed. A wire laid across the road would send an electronic signal causing the bomb to explode just as the first vehicle rolled through each prearranged junction. This is where the Generals became useful. Ten armoured vehicles and two hundred men fully equipped with rocket launchers, machine guns and grenades, hiding in pre-arranged vacant rooms and buildings in the side streets, would burst forth, firing openly on the remnant of each convoy. Zalil’s intention was to decimate all five convoys. The explosion was only diversionary. The President’s vehicle is always fourth in the convoy. As the first two or three cars were caught in the mêlée, the driver of the President’s car, trained for such exigencies, would turn instinctively into the nearest street. Because Zalil and Nizar had selected especially narrow cross streets for each explosion, the driver of vehicle number four in each convoy would have no option other than to turn unthinkingly into the plotters’ side streets. There was no way Saddam would be able to escape.
The plan was faultless. While the convoys were under attack Zalil planned to announce a popular uprising, which the returned exiles were responsible for generating in towns all around the country. ‘By noon, Ba’ath power will be wiped from the pages of Iraqi history,’ he cooed at his tired but eager guests. The sun was rising over the Tigris. Zalil’s dinner party was over.
*
It is true, Zalil’s plan was daring and bold and he had more support than any other plotter before him. To have even the overseas Iraqis supporting the show was Haider Younus’s great contribution. Zalil could not fail. Everything was under control. But then something unexpected and miserable happened. In May, the Prime Minister, Mr Izzat Qureshi, ‘resigned’ and the plotting Minister of Industry, Haider al Haji Younus, was appointed in his place.
As much as anyone, Haider was taken by surprise by this sudden twist of fortune. For years he had struggled for promotion to the Regional Command Council and each of his attempts had been rebuffed. He had resigned himself to dying as Industry Minister, until resentment led him to Zalil’s group. But now, so unexpectedly, Haider was Prime Minister! A seat on the Regional Command Council, dreams of which, until then, had tortured his every waking moment, now, from his lofty new perch, seemed ridiculous. And the resentment he had harboured towards the President for so many years turned, overnight, to bottomless gratitude.
Of course, Haider had been selected as Prime Minister because he was a weak and completely dependent character. Unlike Prime Minister Qureshi who preceded him, he did not enjoy the backing of foreign interests. He was extremely dispensable. The country was in the midst of unexplained bombings and unrest was increasing, not just in Baghdad but throughout the country. If Haider Younus was unable to do what was needed, no one would shout or cry when his time came to be sacrificed.
Naturally, Haider was in a state of confusion as he took his oath of office. He swore allegiance to the Party, the State and the President himself, but at the same time he had made promises to the gateman to destroy all three. It was time to make a quick calculation of risk, but nothing is ever valuable if done quickly. On one side, he knew that Zalil was still depending on him for his support. In fact, on the day of his promotion, Zalil sent a message and a bottle of twenty-one year old Chivas Regal to Haider, congratulating him on his good fortune and predicting an even brighter future — a signal that the plan was to go ahead on schedule. On the other side of the balance, there was the President. Haider was overcome with gratitude by his elevation. Horses, it is said, sometimes bite their master’s hand, but Haider did not consider himself to be a horse. Not unnaturally, his views on the plot changed dramatically.
But not only was Haider not a horse, he was not a decisive creature either. For three weeks he did nothing to suggest to Zalil and his conspiring colleagues that he was in two minds about the plot. And just like Zalil, and all the others who had been drawn close to the Presidential breast had done before him, Haider wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to Saddam. So on the day the President was to return to Iraq to meet his almost certain death at the hands of Zalil, Haider requested the President’s son, Uday, to pay a visit to the Prime Minister’s office.
‘I must notify you,’ Haider told Uday, ‘as the President is out of the country, that a plot to assassinate your father has been uncovered. The plotters are at this very hour gathering at the airport.’ He then elaborated the plan in detail.
*
At Saddam International Airport, Zalil, with most of the government’s senior officials and military top brass, had arrived to welcome the President. At 9.45 a.m. he noted that Haider had not yet arrived; the President’s plane was due to land at 10.10 a.m. Without hesitating, he approached the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Defence.
‘I fear there may be trouble today. The Prime Minister, that rodent Haider Younus, is not here. Indications are that he is involved with Generals Mahmood and Fikri and Colonel Nizar as well as that old fart, Basil, the Oil Minister. I have just received information that their objective is to assassinate not only the President but most of us here.’ He paused. A vehicle pulled up behind the men. ‘Do I need to insist that we should depart immediately and return to the city and do our best to protect the President?’
The three men ducked into Zalil’s vehicle. Inside, Zalil and his two bodyguards removed their pistols and pressed them against the sweating necks of the Ministers. Zalil commanded his driver to head north to Baq’ubah. Before Uday and Haider had been able to notify Military Intelligence, Zalil had disappeared from Baghdad with his two hostages like a cloud in a drought.
When the President’s plane landed, Saddam was advised to remain on board while the plotters, Generals Fikri and Mahmood, Colonel Nizar and the Oil Minister, Basil Hamdoon, were arrested. The army units waiting quietly in their hideouts on the side streets panicked when the time for their action long passed. By evening more than three hundred arrests had been made.
The following day, after the body of the Interior Minister was recovered from an alley in Kirkuk with nails throughout his body, Saddam placed a price on the gateman’s head. Three days later, the Minister of Defence was discovered by a taxi driver, lying in the middle of the highway at Chamchamal. His throat was slit and not a stitch of clothing was on his flabby body. Zalil, the rumours went, escaped to Iran where the Persians welcomed him like an Olympic champion.
Abdul Rahman had been aware of these incidents. Who hadn’t? Each new development was presented in the papers as another demonstration of the invincibility of the President. And so it seemed. If Zalil, that most intimate confidant, could not succeed in his evil, surely the Spirit of the Arabs rested on Saddam. Abdul Rahman trimmed the newspapers like a rose bush, grafting the small news items into his accounts ledger. The involvement of his relative in the mess had disappointed him but, as Haider had acted properly by exposing the plot, Abdul Rahman rested in the confidence that it was the President who was now indebted to his relative. Abdul Rahman’s own destiny was secure. Of this he was certain.
But Saddam was not fooled. For Haider to know about Zalil’s plot in such detail he must have been in on the conspiracy. Prime Ministers, despite their lofty office, do not enjoy direct access to the secret goings-on of Jihaz Haneen. Saddam had chosen Haider because he was expendable and so he was expended. After a meagre six weeks in office, Haider was arrested by the Emergency Law and Order Administrator and taken to Abu Gharaib prison. Within eight hours he was no more.
*
That damp July morning, after the arrest of his relative, as Abdul Rahman drove through the city to his small flat, scales fell from his eyes. His household was in an uproar. He strode into the dining room with motivation and strength, persuaded that whatever confusion he himself felt he would not show it to his family. At the dining table his wife sat sobbing. Jamila, the servant girl, tried to comfort the woman, but was pushed away each time she reached toward Abida’s face. Haroun and Hassan jumped up as soon as they saw Abdul Rahman and said in unison, ‘Father… ’ They wanted to say more but reconsidered. Abdul Rahman sat down next to his weeping wife and told Jamila to bring a cup of coffee. His sons remained standing as if frozen in ice.
‘What is the matter, Abida?’ he asked. ‘Why all the commotion?’
Abida continued to sob for several seconds before lifting her face. She tried to speak but only managed to blub more tears.
‘What is it? Has someone broken into the house? Come now. Be calm. What happened?’ Abdul Rahman’s composure was strained; his mind already confused by the night’s momentous changes. He reached towards his wife and placed a hand on her shoulder. He squeezed her firmly. His mind remained filled with the weirdness he had seen on the streets; he was exhausted. A strong urge to consult his ledger for reassurance that the Prime Minister was, in fact, still on his seat, washed over him. He wanted nothing more than to look at the man’s photos and to re-read the articles of his appointment.
He was growing more impatient with his wife every passing second.
‘Abida!’ he said sternly. ‘Stop nittering and tell me what is the problem! I have a headache like a mountain.’
She wiped her wet face deliberately. Her lips quivered. ‘Zubeida has disappeared. She hasn’t returned since last night. With the changes today I’m afraid she… ’ Abida could say no more.
His hand fell from her shoulder. In the kitchen Jamila, the servant girl, had stopped making coffee, and waited. The house was quiet except for Abida’s soft, unceasing sobs. Haroun and Hassan stood still, daring only to blink. Abdul Rahman leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
‘Why did you allow her to leave the house? And where did she go? Why didn’t you send a message to inform me last night?’ His voice shook with fear.
‘She went to the tutor’s house yesterday afternoon, I think.’ Abida said, still looking at her lap. ‘You are the one who is always pushing her to keep studying even though the world is crumbling around us.’
‘But why didn’t you inform me yesterday?’
‘How am I to contact you? There is a curfew in the city from six p.m. Of course, that is something you haven’t noticed is it? But I’ve noticed it. So has the rest of the city. If we go outside this house after that hour we can be killed. How am I to inform you? I have no number to call you at your office.’
‘Of course, there must be an explanation. If there was a curfew she must have stayed at Mr Mohsin’s overnight. I’m sure Zubi will return as soon as the buses begin to move.’ He felt relieved as he spoke the words.
‘I have called Mr Mohsin. He had no plans to see Zubi yesterday. Only on Thursdays and Mondays since about the last two weeks.’
‘Don’t speak rubbish, bitch!’ he shouted. The chair fell over as he pushed away from the table. The two boys scampered from the room like startled rabbits.
‘In one night my relative, Prime Minister Haider, has been deposed and jailed. The country I thought I lived in and served has changed before my very eyes. I see devils parading up and down the streets. The radio is chanting strange names and barking strange orders. And now…this.’ He moved closer to his wife and pulled her from her chair. She averted her puffy face, flushed from a night of tears. She shivered in his hands. Abdul Rahman had never beaten his wife or children, but that day he raged within himself. He wanted to lash out and hit her for suggesting that his little canary had disappeared. As he loosened one hand he remembered Jamila, the servant girl in the kitchen. ‘Get out! You should never have been in this house. Go! Run! Now!’ he shouted. The front door shut quietly as she slipped away.
Abdul Rahman turned his attention toward his wife. He let her drop to the floor and kicked her; she rolled over and hit her head against the dining table. ‘Where is my daughter? What are you hiding from me? Where is Zubi? Zubi, where are you?’ he called out. His voice bounded off the walls and back into his face as if it were slapping him. Absolute desolation crept into his heart. ‘Where is she? Where is my angel?’
Abida pulled herself up against the wall. She shook her head in silence.
Unable to control his grief he lunged and fell to the floor next to her. His fist hovered for a moment above her face but instead slammed into the wall. And then again, and again. He shouted and pounded until his knuckles split and blood stained the sleeve of his shirt.
That day he didn’t sleep. His mind was a slab of grey slate. Heavy bags were tied to his feet and dragged behind him everywhere he went. Although he drank lemon water constantly, each time he opened his mouth his tongue felt as dry and unwieldy as an old shoe. His heart danced in his chest like a drop of water on a hot plate. He asked Abida to call a doctor, but which doctor was willing to leave his house and come to Abdul Rahman’s? Throughout the day he tended a grief so deep his limbs and ears stung.
Abida refused to join him in his room, and sat without moving in front of the TV, staring at the announcer who read ever longer and more detailed proclamations from the Emergency Law and Order Administrator. ‘In order to ensure maximum peace and stability in the coming week…’ Abida paid no mind. The images coming from the screen passed before her as if they were paying last respects to an acquaintance. Her head was cut slightly where she had rolled into the table; there was no blood but she sucked on her bitter thoughts. ‘I no longer care about your daughter,’ she said in the evening. ‘Zubeida has always been yours, not mine. Your grief leaves no room for me to partake.’
*
Thirty-three days later the Emergency Law and Order Administrator himself was deposed. The new Emergency Law and Order Administrator, Colonel Abdallah, proclaimed that Iraq was now under temporary martial law. In his first address to the people he condemned by name the man he had just overthrown, calling him a jackal. Abdallah emphasised his sincere desire to set the country back on its historic and stable path of development. He said, promised, stressed and underlined many other things but one in particular shocked Abdul Rahman beyond belief.
‘The motivation of President Saddam Hussein and the RCC in embarking on this unprecedented act of armed intervention is to ensure the secure and stable and prosperous future of our country and its citizens. In the recent past some leaders of the State have been isolated from the people. The aspirations and ideals of the common man, the demand for justice and honesty, have been ignored. Even more, they have been deliberately trampled upon. A vast network of repression has been operating in this country with the primary purpose of crushing the spirit and voice and will of the people. It is a sad and bitter reality that in our country there have been many abuses of human rights. The police and special branches have arrested thousands without reason. Hundreds of these have disappeared or been returned to their families after having endured horrific torture and bodily abuse. Some intelligence organisations have been the leaders of this atrocity against the country’s dignity and honour. While there is a legitimate need for the State to defend itself against internal enemies the activities and intentions of some intelligence networks can only be termed criminal. Is it any wonder that you the people of Iraq have demanded the overthrow of this band of murderers? It is only because the President of the Republic knows that you endorse this intervention that I am able to proceed.
‘With immediate effect and until notified by the Emergency Law and Order Administrator, the activities of all intelligence, counter-intelligence, investigative and interrogative bureaux and departments are disbanded and dissolved. All personnel employed by these departments and bureaux are ordered to remain at their place of residence until further notice. They are forbidden to travel beyond the borders of the country until such time as the ELOA determines their appropriate recompense.’
